


Contagion

by Elspethdixon



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-08
Updated: 2003-12-08
Packaged: 2017-10-18 21:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/193314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elspethdixon/pseuds/Elspethdixon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fever strikes the crew of the Poseidon's Revenge, and Bootstrap Bill learns a thing or two about his new profession.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contagion

The kid had been trying to reach the water bucket when he’d collapsed. He lay crumpled face down across the floor, one arm still stretched toward it, motionless fingers reaching. There was a pool of black vomit just to one side of his head, and Bill could see reddish flecks of blood in it, gleaming wetly in the flickering light of the lantern. There was more blood on his face, a line of it trailing down from his nose. He was dead. Bill knew it with a cold, weary certainty.

That made four. Four of the _Poseidon’s Revenge_ ’s crew lost to the fever. Elliot, Jonesy, Ned, and now Jack.

Bill closed his eyes for a moment, blocking out the sight of the twisted form that lay on the deck before him. He only wished the heavy stench of sickness, of vomit and waste and the poisonous vapours of disease, could be blocked out as well. He was tired, so tired of tending to suffering, dying men. Tired of bathing fevered bodies, holding water to cracked lips, watching shipmates waste away. Tired of being helpless.

Wishing desperately that he was anywhere else, Bill reluctantly knelt down beside the kid’s body, taking hold of one bony wrist so that he could swing the body up onto his shoulder and carry it on deck. One more fever victim to be sewn into a sailcloth winding sheet and sent to Davy Jones.

The wrist twitched.

Not dead, then. Yet. Bill’s relief was dulled by the knowledge that it was really only a matter of time anyway. Yellow jack was not a forgiving illness. Three of the _Revenge’s_ eight stricken pirates had already succumbed, and most of the rest got worse with every hour that passed.

“Let’s get you back in your hammock, lad,” he sighed, hoisting Jack’s limp body up off the deck. Heat radiated from his skin, obvious even in the stifling warmth of the _Revenge’s_ lower decks. Shoulders bent under the weight, Bill stumbled the few steps over to Sparrow’s hammock and dumped him in it, straightening his back with relief. Jack wasn’t exactly on the large side, but he was heavy as only dead weight could be, and the part eight days had worn Bill’s energy to nothing.

“What were you trying to do, you daft little magpie?” Bill asked, as he straightened bent limbs and brushed tangled black hair out of Jack’s face. He knew the lad couldn’t answer him, but the ship had become so silent in recent days that he often found himself speaking simply to hear the sound of his own voice.

“Sparrow.” It was a whisper, so faint and slurred that Bill almost didn’t catch it.

“Come again, lad?” he asked.

Brown eyes slid halfway open and glared at him, not quite focused. “Not magpie… Sparrow…”

“It’s small, it’s noisy, it has wings,” Bill found himself saying, repeating the familiar words even though they weren’t really funny anymore. “What’s the difference?” He continued straight on, not letting Jack answer. “Do you want some water?”

“Water?” Jack blinked at him, eyes still staring at some invisible thing beyond Bill’s shoulder.

Bill crossed back to the water bucket and pulled the dipper out of it, carrying it across to the hammock. “Water. Here, come on.” He slid an arm under Jack’s shoulders and pulled him up slightly to a half sitting position, holding the dipper to his lips.

Jack drank, and then his eyes slid closed again. For a moment, Bill thought he had passed out, until his eyes reopened, and he whispered, “Barbossa?”

“He’s on deck,” Bill told him. “He’ll be down soon to have a look round.”

Jack didn’t answer. His eyes closed again and this time they stayed closed. Bill wasn’t even sure that he had heard.

Feeling even more tired than he had a moment ago, Bill dipped a rag in the last of the water and started washing the blood off the lad’s face. He still looked so young, nevermind that he was old enough to shave, old enough to have lain with a woman, old enough to have killed his first man. At the moment, he looked about thirteen, and it made watching him waste away even harder.

Finishing his task, Bill turned away from the motionless form and went to check on the other hammocks.

Dick Smollett lay still, barely breathing. His skin, dyed a strange, orangy colour by the fever, was so hot it was painful to touch, and the pulse in his throat beat so slowly that Bill almost missed it when he tried to check. He probably wasn’t going to last out the day.

Bill tried to wake him, to give him some water too, but nothing he did could rouse the man. With a heavy feeling in his chest, he settled for simply brushing some water across his shipmate’s cracked lips and moving on.

Piet was shifting restlessly in his hammock, muttering to himself in Dutch. Bill gave him water and washed his face, trying to cool him down, but those pale blue eyes simply stared though him, unfocused and glazed. Piet was another one too young to die like this. He hadn’t even seen twenty-five yet, and if things went on like this, he wasn’t going to. And he would never learn proper English, either, or get a gold tooth to fill in that gap in the front of his mouth. He’d always said he was going to get himself one the next time the _Poseidon’s Revenge_ took a prize, but he always spent his money on drink and women and candied fruit before he could. Or he’d leave his share of the take lying around and someone would nick it. Usually Elliot or Smollett. Or Jonsey, who wouldn’t nick things but instead just threatened his smaller shipmates with one big, heavy fist. Except that Jonsey wasn’t frightening anyone except the crabs and sharks now.

He checked on Hairy Amos last, and too his relief found that Amos, at least, still hadn’t taken on the tell-tale yellowish skin tones of the disease. He had been one of the last to fall ill, and didn’t seem as bad off as the others. Maybe he was going to escape.

Hairy Amos was sleeping, but he woke at a touch on his shoulder and rubbed at his eyes. “Bill?” He groaned, closing his eyes again. “Damn. Confounded light ‘urts my ‘ead.”

“Want some water?” Bill offered. “It’s about all I can do for you. We’re out of laudanum and I’m afraid I might hurt you if I tried bleeding you again. It didn’t do Elliot any good, and it doesn’t seem to be helping Sparrow or Piet much either.”

“No,” Amos moaned. “I’d only throw it back up again.”

“All right then.” Bill lowered the half filled dipper he’d been about to offer. Instead he handed Amos a wet rag to lay across his eyes. “You think you’ll be all right for now?” he asked, hoping Amos would say yes and free him to go back on deck, away from the fetid hellhole the lower decks had become.

Hairy Amos pulled at the luxuriant beard—now sweat-soaked and matted—that had earned him his name and nodded. “Go back up. Who’s watchin’ the ship?”

“Rafael and Barbossa.”

“Go take the ‘elm back from that shifty Portuguesie whoreson ‘for ‘e wrecks us.”

“Barbossa will heave him over the side if he does,” Bill answered, but he went straight for the hatchway, feeling like a man who’d been granted a stay of execution. The air on deck was the cleanest, most wonderful thing he’d ever breathed. Fresh, salty, and free of the smell of death.

Death. He was so tired of death. It was one thing to lose a shipmate in battle, or to the hangman’s noose, but this slow, wasting agony… He couldn’t watch it anymore.

Bill scrubbed a hand over his face, feeling stubble scratching at his palm, and tried to gather his thoughts. Marshall his arguments.

Then he went to find Barbossa.

The newly promoted first mate was not on deck, nor was he in the galley or on the gun deck, where the few healthy pirates remaining had begun hanging their hammocks, in an attempt to avoid contagion. He finally stumbled upon him leaving the captain’s cabin. Black Tom Argos had been the last man onboard to fall ill, shortly after drafting Barbossa to fill the dead Ned Meade’s shoes, and Barbossa had been tending him himself. If he hadn’t been, these past few days would _really_ have been unbearable; one more patient and Bill would have thrown himself overboard to escape.

“Hector.”

Barbossa didn’t quite jump, but his shoulders did jerk a little before he turned around to greet Bill. Everyone was getting jumpy these days, with the silent wraith of fever stalking the _Revenge’s_ decks. “Bootstrap,” he acknowledged, inclining his head slightly. “Who is it this time?”

“No one, yet,” Bill answered, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Give it a few hours, though, and we’ll be burying Dick Smollett. Piet and Sparrow too, in a few days.”

Barbossa carefully closed the door to Captain Argos’s cabin, cutting off Bill’s view of the man lying in the narrow bunk, the dead white pallor of his face standing out starkly against his black hair and beard. He took Bill by the elbow and steered him out onto the deck, away from where Rafael stood at the helm. The ship’s cat followed them, twining herself around Barbossa’s ankles. He ignored her, but didn’t kick her out of the way, either. “I assume ye have some other piece of bad tidings to give me, then?”

Bill had planned on delivering a well thought out speech, really he had, but when it came down to it, he was simply too tired and worried to form the words. What emerged instead was more like a plea. “They’re all dying.”

“Yes, I had noticed that,” Barbossa said.

“They’re dying,” Bill repeated, stressing the words, hearing his voice rising, “and I don’t know how to stop it. I can’t do anything! They need a doctor. We can go to Port Royal,” he continued, pressing on before Barbossa could voice the denial he could see in the other man’s face. “It’s less than a day’s steady sailing from here. They’ll have a doctor, an apothecary, _someone_ who can help us.” He waved an arm in the direction of Jamaica, the kind of flamboyant gesture Barbossa himself liked to make, the sort Jack was always imitating, trying to impress upon the man the urgency of their need.

Barbossa sighed, and gave Bill an almost regretful smile. “An English port is just as likely to have them hung as it is to let a doctor see them.” He held up a hand, forestalling Bill’s incipient outbust. “Besides, there’s not a port in the Caribbean that will let the _Poseidon’s Revenge_ tie up at their docks with fever aboard, and ye know it, Turner. Men are more afraid of a yellow flag than they are of a black one.”

Bill slumped, the anger draining out of him. Barbossa was right, of course. The man was always right. How did he always manage to make the most painful, unpleasant truths sound so reasonable?

“They’re _dying_ ,” he said again, more softly this time.

“They’ll die faster with a noose around their necks.”

Bill closed his eyes for a moment, grief for his shipmates warring with an irrational anger at Barbossa. How could he be so calm, so practical, while their lives ebbed away? For God’s sake, he hadn’t even been to see Jack, the one man onboard Bill knew Barbossa actually _liked_! The whelp followed him around like some hyper, cocky little shadow, and now he was dying and Barbossa wasn’t even there.

“It’s not right,” he snapped, glaring angrily at the deck to avoid meeting those cool, amused eyes. “We should do something.”

“What do ye suggest?” Barbossa asked mildly.

Bill shoved back the urge to rip Barbossa’s stupid plumed hat off his head and choke him with it. It wouldn’t solve anything, and the _Revenge’s_ crew was already down to three men. “Forget it,” he snarled. “I’ll come get you when Smollett’s dead.” And then he stalked off to relieve Rafael at the wheel.

***

  
They buried Dick Smollett at sunset, slinging him overboard in a canvass shroud, with roundshot sewn in at his head and feet to weight him down. That made four. Ned, Elliot, Jonesy, and Smollett. Bill couldn’t help wondering whether Jack or Piet would be buried next. Neither of them were coherent now. Jack hadn’t really woken up since the last time he’d asked about Barbossa, only stirring occasionally and moaning things Bil couldn’t make out. Piet kept rambling in Dutch, and seemed not to hear when Bill tried to speak to him.

“I’m feelin’ a lot better now,” Hairy Amos offered from where he lay in his hammock, watching Bill sponge down Piet’s face and torso. “Could prob’ly ‘elp you with that.”

Bill shook his head. “Stay there,” he ordered. “Jonesy felt better too, until he started puking up blood.”

Amos didn’t argue. Judging by the greyish look of his face, Bill guessed that he was lying about feeling better. At least he was talking sense, and not vomiting black bile and bleeding from his nose and mouth. Piet had just finished doing both. There was still a small trickle of red dripping from one of his nostrils. Bill washed it away with the rag he was using to swab him down.

“Does anyone ever survive this damn fever?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” Amos said. Bill hadn’t really been talking to him, though he realised as soon as the other man spoke that it probably was the wrong rhetorical question to ask in front of someone currently sick with yellow jack. “I expect I’m goin’ to. Seen men catch it before, and the ones what don’t turn yellow gen’rally live. Some o’ the ones that got it bad pulled through, too,” he added, his eyes following Bill’s movements as he tried to cool Piet’s fevered skin down.

Bill didn’t say anything. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He might not have liked all of his dead shipmates, but the _Revenge_ and her crew were all he had. He could never go back to England now, not with a price on his head and a death sentence hanging over him. Never go back to Caroline and the baby—William, she’d said his name was, in the only letter that had survived the journey overseas to reach him. William would be two now, maybe even three. He be walking, talking, too. Bill would never get to see him. He’d never seen him at all, though the letter had said he had brown eyes. Like Caroline’s, he imagined, but he’d never know for sure. He’d given all that up when he’d chosen to throw in with the _Revenge’s_ crew rather than take his chances in that leaky ship’s boat with the rest of the survivors from the _Fortuna’s Venture_.

The _Poseidon’s Revenge_ and his new shipmates were all he had now, and now he was losing them, too. And nothing he tried to do seemed to do any good.

It made him angry, he realised, angry with Barbossa, for not going to Jamaica to fetch a doctor, and the risks be damned, angry with this bloody unstoppable fever, angry, wrong-headed as he knew it was, with his dead and dying shipmates, for letting themselves fall sick, and angry with himself, for not being able to stop it. And for all the opportunities he had denied himself, and would never have again.

For every night in Tortuga or Bridgetown when he stayed onboard and thought longingly of Caroline instead of drinking with everybody else, because, though he might fight alongside pirates, a decent man didn’t get drunk with them. For every time he secretly felt guilty for laughing at Ned’s jokes, or despised Jonesy for being a bully—which he had been, but he’d been a good, solid man at your back in a fight, too—or wanted to belt that little brat Sparrow a good one for being a loud-mouthed, cocksure little thief who was going to grow up to be exactly like Barbossa if he didn’t watch himself. Because now they were dead or dying, and really, when all was said and done, wasn’t trying to stay aloof from them all rather hypocritical, when he, whatever he might have been before the _Fortuna’s Venture_ had sunk, was now a pirate as well?

He dipped the rag—now beginning to dry out—back into the bucket of water and drew it down the side of Piet’s fevered face. “I don’t know that Piet and Sparrow are going to make it,” he confessed, not looking at Amos. He didn’t look at Piet or Jack either, concentrating instead on the piece of worn sailcloth in his hands.

Amos sighed and closed his eyes, looking even more worn down than Bill felt. “If we ‘ave to bury anyone else, we’ll likely run out of extra sails.”

“No.” It was a faint sound, little more than a moan, but it pulled Bill’s head around to face Jack’s hammock faster than an order bawled across a quarterdeck. Jack’s eyes were open, the whites bloodshot and yellowed with fever, and his head had turned towards Bill and Amos.

“No burying,” he mumbled. “Not on land… Ground opens up… Spits a man back out again.” He reached out to make a grab at Bill, and his hand fell short, dangling limply over the side of the hammock. “Doesn’ like me.”

Bill, who had started moving as soon as Jack began to speak, picked the hand back up and replaced it at Jack’s side. The bird and horizon tattoo he’d gotten the last time they were in port was still raw around the edges, and looked odd against the strange orange cast of his skin. Come to think of it, that trip to Barbados was probably where they had picked this damnable fever up to begin with.

“What doesn’t like you, lad?” Bill heard himself asking, as he started swabbing Jack’s overheated face and chest down the way he had just been doing Piet’s.

“Land.” Somehow, even though the word was barely more than a hoarse whisper, Jack managed to imbue it with infinite amounts of longsuffering annoyance, as if only a witless fool would fail to find it completely obvious.

“He’s out of his head,” Bill announced sadly. It wasn’t right that Sparrow, who’d always had such a quick tongue, should be reduced by fever to talking nonsense.

“I dunno.” Hairy Amos gave a sort of half shrug. “I think I heard Barbossa mention oncett that he was from Jamaica. He’d have been just a brat when Port Royal sank. I heard tell that all the graveyards opened up and spat the dead back out for anyone to see.”

Bill raised his eyebrows. He heard those stories too, but he knew better than to put much credence in that sort of thing. Still, he’d heard otherwise trustworthy men talk about the earth heaving up and down and the ground falling away into Kingston Harbour. That sort of thing would stay with a man.

“Nobody’s going to bury you,” he told Jack.

Some of the fear went out of those wide, dark eyes. “Promise? You won’t leave me on an island? In the ground?”

“No islands,” Bill agreed. “We’ll send you down to Davy Jones where you belong.”

“Oh.” Jack closed his eyes, all of the tension draining out of him. “No worries, then.” Asleep again, or unconscious. But Bill thought that maybe, just maybe, his face wasn’t quite as hot as it had been this morning.

He tried very hard to hold onto that thought when Jack started vomiting again a glass or so later. There was nothing left in his stomach but the water Bill kept giving him, but that only made the blood more disturbingly apparent. At least there was no longer blood oozing at the corners of his eyes. There had been, yesterday, and it had been largely the memory of that which had convinced Bill that Jack was dead when he had seen him collapsed on the deck.

Jonesy’s eyes had done that too. What did this fever do to a man’s bodily humours to produce so much blood? In vomit, in urine, oozing from the eyes, nose and mouth; it was as if someone had beaten them all half to death, without leaving any bruises.

In the back of Bill’s mind, the nagging fear that he would be next slithered into the open again. He ignored it. He hadn’t fallen ill yet, he reminded himself. Surely, if he were going to, he would have already done so days ago.

“I’m goin’ t’die,” Jack moaned, attempting with limited success to curl up into a ball. Hammocks didn’t exactly lend themselves to that sort of thing.

“You’re making sense now,” Bill said heartily, trying to be encouraging. “That’s wonderful.”

“I’m goin’ t’kill you,” Jack told him, eyes closed and face a portrait of misery, “an’ then I’m goin’ t’die.”

Bill smiled in spite of himself, suddenly feeling a wave of relief. A whining and complaining Jack Sparrow was an immense improvement over a semi-conscious and incoherent one. If he could be annoying, then he was probably going to live. His face really did feel cooler than it had. Now if only Piet would also wake up and start talking sensibly again.

“I’ll get you some more water,” Bill said, glancing back towards the water bucket. Jack’s eyes followed his and he made a face.

“Don’ want any,” he mumbled. “I’ll get sick again.”

“You will anyway.” Bill spoke with the certainty of someone who now knew far more than he’d ever wanted to know about fever victims. “At least this way you’ll have something inside you to come up.”

Jack said something very rude-sounding in Portuguese that he’d probably learned from Rafael. His voice was low and hoarse, nearly a whisper, and he had his eyes closed again, not even turning his head to follow Bill’s movements as he went over to the water bucket to fetch him another drink. Still, Bill felt as if a small part of the weight he’d been carrying around for days had been lifted. At least two of the _Poseidon’s Revenge_ ’s crew were going to live.

And then a pair of booted feet started to descend through the hatchway from the upper deck. Barbossa, his mind supplied automatically; Rafael went barefoot.

“Bootstrap?” the first mate called, as he ducked through the entrance. “Are ye down here?”

Jack opened his eyes again, and tried unsuccessfully to sit up, while Hairy Amos, on the other side of the deck, went from idly watching the ceiling to paying attention so hard that Bill could almost hear him doing it.

“Aye?” Bill said.

Barbossa didn’t even look at Jack, let alone Amos or Piet. His eyes went straight to Bill’s face as he announced, “The Captain is dead.”

Suddenly, that weight on Bill’s shoulders, the one that had just been getting lighter, was doubled.

***

  
Little as it was, the captain’s cabin was still big enough for Bill, Barbossa, and Rafael to fit inside it with room to spare. Maybe it was the presence of the corpse that made it feel so crowded.

Black Tom Argos had been a big, forceful man, but death seemed to have hollowed him out, leaving nothing behind but a grey, sunken shell. There was something odd about that, about the way he just lay there so empty and pale, like a statue carved out of candlewax, but Bill didn’t feel up to figuring out what. There were more important things to consider.

He and the other two men stared at each other across Captain Argos’s body. The silence stretched out for a long moment, until Rafael finally broke it.

“So,” he said, glancing toward Barbossa, “you are the _capitan_ now, yes?”

Rather callous, considering that Captain Argos was lying right there, but certainly to the point.

“One would assume so,” Barbossa said. He smiled ever so slightly. “Unless ye want to try yer luck at taking the position.”

Rafael, who was not a stupid man by any means, however thickly accented his English, shook his head.

“Bootstrap?” Barbossa asked, turning to pin Bill with that cool, considering gaze.

“You’re the first mate,” Bill said. He shrugged, feeling slightly dissatisfied with the arrangement for no real reason he could name. Barbossa had been within his rights not to take them to Jamaica for help, had probably kept the healthy part of the crew out of the hangman’s noose by not doing so. It didn’t make the decision any less harsh, or the cost of it any lower.

A merchantman’s captain would have gone to get help for his crew. But Barbossa obviously didn’t think like a sailor from a merchantman, even if Bill still did most of the time. Barbossa was a pirate, and a good one. He would probably be a good captain, too, but he wasn’t going to be a very pleasant one.

“Aye, well, looks like I be the captain now.” Barbossa grinned as he made the pronouncement, just a little too cheerfully. Bill remembered cheerful, from the days back before the fever had hit. Barbossa seemed to have done a better job of holding onto it then he had.

After that, things were settled. Barbossa, hat and all, went to take the helm, and Bill and Rafael were left to get Captain Argos ready for burial. It was a depressingly familiar task, and before an hour had passed they had him laid out and wrapped in an old sail, with roundshot at his feet.

Rafael whispered something in Portuguese and made the sign of the cross over the captain’s body, then used two fingers to close his eyes. Bill as usual, was left with the nasty part of things. Taking a deep breath—surreptitiously, it didn’t do to look too squeamish onboard the _Revenge_ —he ran the curved needle through the dead man’s nose before taking the last few stitches to sew the shroud shut. Captain Argos never stirred, and his torn nose didn’t bleed, proving beyond a doubt that the man who had given Bill a chance in his crew instead of stranding him in boat in the middle of the ocean really was dead.

That made five. Daniel Elliott, Ned Meade, Jonesy, Dick Smollett, and Black Tom Argos. The crew had practically been cut in half. Barbossa would have to take on more men soon. Bill could leave then, maybe, find some more legitimate ship to sail on, if one would have him. A ship where no one trusted him, and no one knew him.

As the two of them carried the shrouded body out onto the deck, Bill nearly tripped over a small obstacle just outside the door. One that gave under his boot heel in a most disturbing way. He glanced down to see the stiff corpse of a rat, its spine bowed back on itself in death.

“Barbossa’s damned cat leaves its nasty little gifts for him all over the ship,” he muttered, glaring at the dead vermin before kicking it away and backing carefully toward the hatchway and up onto the deck.

Rafael, following his movements, shook his head. “No. It was not the cat,” he said. He let Captain Argos’s feet drop to the deck with a dull thud of iron and flesh. “It is twisted, not bitten. Barbossa—the _capitan_ —he must be setting out poison. I think we get some for the gun deck. Rats, they spread disease, you know?”

“Good idea.”

It wasn’t until later, when the three healthy men, plus a grey-faced Hairy Amos and a distinctly unsteady and glazed-eyed Jack Sparrow, gathered on deck to consign Black Tom Argos’s body to the deep, that the significance of that little furry body struck Bill.

Poison. He thought about Piet, still lying below in a fevered stupor, his pale skin dyed yellowish-orange. Remembered Jonesy, Ned, Elliot, and Smollett, whose faces had been dark and orange and whose eyes had stayed yellowed and bloodshot even in death. Looked at Jack, leaning heavily on Bill’s arm and looking like he was trying his damnedest not to be ill again, dark eyes that had been seeping blood mere days ago still shot through with red. And thought about the captain’s grey, colourless face, and the white and brown blankness of his open, empty eyes.

“Seen men catch it before,” Hairy Amos’s voice drawled in his memory, “and the ones what don’t turn yellow gen’rally live.”

Hector Barbossa— _Captain_ Hector Barbossa—always had been ambitious.  
And cool, and reasonable, and perfectly willing to spill a little blood to get what he wanted. Suddenly, his decision not to sail for help seemed a little more sinister than a simple choice to avoid risk taking. The first mate dead of fever, most of the crew down with it, and nothing between Barbossa and command of the _Poseidon’s Revenge_ but one already ill man who was under the care of him and him alone. And poison ready to hand.

Captain Argos’s body hit the water with a loud splash, and sank slowly out of sight. And Barbossa, it seemed to Bill, smiled ever so slightly.

Bill looked at that smile, and at the polished and sharpened sword hanging at his new captain’s side, and at the pathetic remains of the _Revenge’s_ crew—one of whom was now standing near Barbossa in a not-entirely-subtle attempt to curry favour with the new man in charge and another of whom was unconsciously trying to copy the new captain’s arrogant stance despite barely being able to keep his feet—and kept silent.

If he wanted to stay onboard the _Poseidon’s Revenge_ , enjoy the company of his shipmates, and keep sending gold back home to Caroline and his son, he needed to stay alive and well. Which meant that Bootstrap Bill Turner was going to make damn sure he stayed out of Barbossa’s way.

 

~End~

  
 _  
****  
_

This instalment of angst and h/c, which has no real plot and might as well be a PWP (except for the whole lack of any romance or sex whatsoever thing), was brought to you by [](http://sidhe-elf.livejournal.com/profile)[**sidhe_elf**](http://sidhe-elf.livejournal.com/) ’s request for a h/c story, several online medical journals, and the movie _Nightmare on Elm Street_ , which provided me with a mental image of teenaged Jack (albeit with, um, bad 80s hair).

**Author's Note:**

> Poseidon’s Revenge: Approximately 80% of all pirate ships had the word “revenge” somewhere in their name (ex: Blackbeard’s ship was the Queen Ann’s Revenge). Eighteenth century ships in general often had Greek or Latin names, it being the heyday of the classical revival. Also, I read Robert Fagles’ translation of the Odyssey this summer.
> 
> Yellow jack = Yellow fever. It ran rife in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century, to the point where some island postings gained a reputation as death traps. Yes, it really does turn the skin orangy-yellow (hence the name). In advanced stages, it causes victims to vomit black bile and bleed from the nose, mouth, and eyes.
> 
> How did Barbossa go from being captain of the Poseidon’s Revenge to first mate of the Black Pearl? Well, there’s an interval of about six or seven years between this story and the mutiny, and a lot can happen in that span of time. Fortunes change, ships sink, but backstabbing, murderous first mates don’t change their spots.


End file.
